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I agree. It is not like 'ls' is predicting weather and telling the fortune. It lists files and directories. It has a zillion options to control its behaviour
by reddit_clone 14y ago
I agree.
It is not like 'ls' is predicting weather and telling the fortune.
It lists files and directories. It has a zillion options to control its behaviour and output. I see nothing wrong with those options if they will be of use to somebody. I use 4-5 options myself and know them by heart.
I do admit that a new user can get overwhelmed if he looks at the man page.
- quesera 14y agoI agree. ls is primarily a user-facing utility, and has acquired a ton of display and formatting switches. This is not a bad thing. Some of the display options are superfluous but convenient. Others are awkward, very hard, or impossible to duplicate in a pipeline. New users don't need to be overwhelmed by the man page. -a and -l should be enough for >99% of use cases. ls shows up in shell scripts too, but that's almost always a mistake -- or a dependency on one of the harder-to-duplicate formatting options.